Skip Gorman: It's about time

Tuesday

Mar 18, 2014 at 1:10 PM

Last week (especially 26.5 seconds after one minute until two o'clock) brought us Pi day (3.14159265 . . . ) and Saturday was the Ides of March (which allowed us to envision Julius Caesar getting stabbed about 60 times).

By Skip Gormanskippergorman@gmail.com

Here’s another weekly potpourri of thoughts and observations about breaking news and Valley things both great and small . . .This AudioBlogColumn is brought to you by The Ridgecrest Republican Women. Keeping the Valley informed on vital local, state and national issues. Spunky like-minded women and quiet reserved gents discussing exceptional constitutional solutions to relentless liberal problems. The Ridgecrest Republican Women. Come to our next meeting! Last week (especially 26.5 seconds after one minute until two o’clock) brought us Pi day (3.14159265 . . . ) and Saturday was the Ides of March (which allowed us to envision Julius Caesar getting stabbed about 60 times). So come round and beware! Monday (the day you are listening to this online mailing) was Saint Patrick’s day. Remember please, that I dutifully observed this day some weeks ago with the telling of my favorite Irish joke (Kevin O’Shawnassy and the Paternal Irish Brotherhood Association). If you missed it then that’s just a bleedin’ shame for I’ll not be telling it again!The point is, Humankind has a propensity of memorializing many days of the year in observance of famous people, occasions and astronomic events. And that’s just fine. But what if we lived in a world whose physical integration with the rest of the universe was such that TIME simply did not exert its presence in any obvious way. Let’s say our “timeless” earth had no day or night, perhaps because it didn’t rotate and there was no sun nor moon and the stars were occluded by a relentless cloud cover. Yes, our whole world seemed like Seattle. This gray stasis was perhaps further reinforced by a lack of any regular volcanic, seismic and meteorologic activity. Also, let’s assume there were no seasons and any perceptible global warming (or cooling or global anything) existed only in the wistful imaginations of those hysterical liberals who may also inhabit our unchanging static world. And keep in mind, for purposes of this hypothetical thesis, that Humankind, along with all God’s flora and fauna, evolved in this strange environment.The question is: Would we humans then “invent” the concept of time in such an environment? Would we dope-out some convenient time intervals as we did for length intervals (where we used our foot)? Indeed, It is easy to imagine that in this Seattle-earth, Humankind would stumble across some effective means of measuring distance, liquid capacity, temperature, and weight (and other vital metrics which I am unable to think of just now). But what about time? Would it be intuitive? Are you sure? You might be tempted to aver that time is so ubiquitous, so pervasive, such an obvious element of our existence that we (sentient beings!) simply could not be so oblivious of it’s existence and nature. I wonder . . . According to the current standard model of cosmology, dark energy plus dark matter constitute over 95 percent of the total contents of the universe. But we can’t see, feel, smell or bump into any of it because it’s effectively “just not there.” But once we find some elusive subatomic particle and then tweak the laws of physics a bit we will no doubt find that we just could not get along without it. But Humankind came late to the dark matter party. It wasn’t until the 1930s that Jan Oort and Fritz Zwicky postulated the existence of all that “missing mass” to account for the way things are rolling out in the universe. The point is that, once dark matter finally comes out of its closet, it will appear as ever-present and obvious as time. And speaking of which . . .There’s a wonderful scene near the end of the classic sci-fi movie, “Blade Runner.” The last Nixes-6 replicant, Batty, has lost his quest for immortality and is about to expire. Sitting lotus position in the rain on the roof of the Bradbury building in L.A., Batty smiles, almost bashfully, and says to his nemesis, blade runner Deckard:“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost ... in time. Like . . . tears . . . in rain. Time . . . to die.”That has been this week’s AudioBlogColumn, and this is Skip Gorman (skippergorman@gmail.com) returning you all now back to a quieter and gentler place. . .